Everything You’ll Need To Make Perfect Doughnuts

Take a moment to consider the doughnut. That spongy ring of dough has a rather unique kind of versatility, a staple of breakfast, snack time and any other instance in which a sweet tooth may come a calling. No doubt part of its success relies on its diversity, with doughnuts either served plain, drenched in chocolate or baked with ingredients like bacon or green tea. These treats are also a great way to further develop one’s cooking skills, testing a number of different abilities in the kitchen. Want to test your mettle against these rings of tantalizing dough?

Here are the ingredients and tools you must have for truly dynamic doughnuts:

Key ingredients
For the most part, doughnuts are a relatively straightforward recipe. However, they include a few crucial ingredients, each of which help make the fluffiest doughnuts possible. These include:

Flour: Without flour, doughnuts aren’t as elastic, which means they can’t trap the air responsible for thei overall lightness.

Yeast: Primarily, yeast is the main agent for helping to raise the dough itself. There are a few yeast options available, but many chefs opt for active-dry over instant yeast.

Sugar: It might seem obvious, but sugar is responsible for the sweetness, which is why you want to use better quality brands when possible. Superfine sugar mixes are preferred, since they work best with most dry ingredients.

Baking powder: You could use baking soda, but that often requires an acid to be most effective, Baking pwoder is more direct and helps to leaven the doughnuts.

Butter and oil: Doughnuts get their tenderness from fats like butter. Meanwhile, oil is used to fry the doughnut, so you want something with a high smoking point like peanut or safflower oil.

Tools of the trade
Some individuals well rely on a doughnuts machine to do most of the work for them. For those who are looking for a more hands-on experience, you just need the following tools:

Scale: It’s important to weigh the sugar and flour beforehand to find the perfect ratios.

Hand mixer: This will help you as you have to knead the dough for quite some time.

Doughnut cutter: These metal shapes make forming the actual doughnuts a breeze. Just make sure you purchase cutters that are especially firm and durable.

Pots and pans: When it comes to frying, you want a nice heavy-bottomed pan that can hold about 2 liters of oil. As for pans, most will do, but try and go for the special doughnut pans as they reinforce the dough during cooking.

Candy thermometer: Unlike those for meat, the candy thermometer can handle higher temperatures – up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit – and are decidedly more accurate to boot.

Secret ingredients
While oil, flour, yeast and butter are the primary components of most doughnut recipes, some chefs have a few secret add-ins that they rely on. The first is mashed potatoes, which chefs swear helps a more fluffy texture inside and out. The trick, though, is to only use about a third a cup of potatoes and half a cup of flour, otherwise you’ll have huge chunks of potato in your final dough. The other mystery ingredient is replacing traditional flour with soy flour. Chefs use soy flour because it better absorbs the oil, resulting in doughnut that are fluffier and far less greasy.